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Hulu Launches With Few YouTube Killing Qualities
Hulu.com, the online video venture from NBC Universal and News Corp., has launched a private beta program. Early reports suggest it's far from being a YouTube killer. "Although Hulu's parent companies have done a lot of things right with the service, the scheduling leaves something to be desired. For the time being, the site will only feature five weeks worth of content for any given show. From there, it's assumed that older content will get the boot in favor of newer episodes and movies. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker for us, but for a lot of viewers this will prevent the service from becoming with online video Shangri-La they'd imagined. Furthermore, with the lack of user-generated content, it falls short of the end-all be-all site for online video. Viewers are still going to go to YouTube and still click their ads -- but in terms of piracy a minor rebellion may have been quelled."
... is NBC trying to create a "Youtube Killer" ?
... but if all NBC is trying to do is offer their recent tv shows online then it sounds like NBC is doing exactly what they set out to. Did NBC ever mention trying to compete with Youtube ? I thought they just didn't want random people uploading random content that NBC owns the copyright to on Youtube. Not trying to steal the "market" or something.
I thought they were just trying to provide a service where you can get their videos through a medium that they control ?
Also, (while I didn't RTFA), if they provide full length episodes in a single stream then they do offer something over Youtube. While I can often find complete episodes on youtube they need to be broken up in to 10 minute clips and sometimes you find the first 10 minutes and then can't find the rest of the episode and that's really annoying.
From the summary it sounds like their major "gripe" (for lack of a better word) is the lack of user generated content and only fresh episodes